Mark 16:1-8
Have you ever seen a Bilby? They’re a very rare and endangered animal so I’d be impressed if you had. There’s been a move in recent years to substitute chocolate Bilbies for chocolate Bunnies at Easter time. Bilbies have big ears like rabbits, they’re about the same size. So if you want a pagan fertility symbol that is culturally relevant and environmentally appropriate, eat a Bilby for Easter!
I haven’t seen a Bilby, but I did see a Bandicoot once (Bilbies are part of the Bandicoot family – they’re also known as Rabbit-Eared Bandicoots). It was a notable occasion because I didn’t know what they were at the time. It was in Kakadu NP. I was camping by myself, in a little tent, no one for miles around. In the middle of the night I was woken by movement outside the tent, a snuffling, scratching sound – “there’s something out there!” I got my torch, upzipped the tent, snapped on the light, and there it was, this strange, outlandish creature. It looked like a giant rat with an extra long nose.
It’s the middle of night remember, I was half asleep, still half immersed in dream world, and in my dreams giant rats are the stuff of nightmares. So when I saw this strange thing, which I only later learnt to be a Bandicoot, my first reaction was horror – I stared at it in stunned amazement, grasping for connections, desperately trying to fit it into my experience, is it rabbit? No! Is it a possum? No! It wouldn’t fit, and I suddenly knew myself to be in a strange, foreign place with alien creatures – what monsters might lurk in Kakadu’s dark places? Was I about to be mauled by a giant rodent? – nibbled to death by a Bandicoot?
You might laugh, but fear of the unknown is a pretty basic human response, isn’t it? When things are beyond our understanding, outside our experience, it’s not unusual to feel deeply unsettled, frightened, threatened. And is that what is going on at the Easter tomb this morning?
Those women approaching the tomb don’t realise they are about to enter another world, a strange place where they will see an extraordinary heavenly creature, an angel – for the “the barrier between the divine and human worlds has fallen away” (A Costly Freedom, Brendan Byrne 2008 p255). A new creation is breaking in through that tomb.
Is that what we normally think when we consider Easter? The resurrection of Jesus is not just a weird and perhaps discomforting, but ultimately joyful story about a bloke getting up when he’s been down – it is that, but it is also a sign that the new life of God’s new world is breaking in to ours. And that is stunning and different and beyond what we have experienced before, and for the women at the tomb, utterly terrifying.
They are like new arrivals in a new world. I came to Australia as a ten year old, and I remember the feeling of entering a strange, foreign place. But at least I’d seen kangaroos on TV – all those years of watching Skippy – imagine what it must have been like for the first arrivals in 1788. One early settler, Barron Field, describes Australia as “a land of contrarieties, where the laws of nature seem reversed … where the swans are black and the eagles white; where the kangaroo, an animal between the squirrel and the deer, has five claws on its fore paws, and three talons on its hide legs, like a bird, and yet hops on its tail; where the mole … lays eggs, suckles its young, and has a duck’s bill” [Barron Field, Geographical Memoirs on NSW]. An upside down world – we can hear Barron Field trying to fit it into his experience. Comparing the unbelievably strange with the familiar – kangaroos like squirrels and deer, platypuses like moles. Everything they saw was like my Bandicoot experience. A stunning new world.
But if we take the arrival of the first fleet as an example of the Easter experience, then I wonder whether the women at the tomb are perhaps even more like those people who were already here standing on the shore when the white sails came billowing through the Heads – those for whom Australia was the known, the familiar, their home. Imagine them seeing the strange white men come, in their enormous canoes, with their strange clothes and weird woolly animals. Something radically new was breaking into the world of their familiar experience – it must have been like the barrier between worlds falling away. And the meeting of those two worlds would bring extraordinary transformation, for some, it would be cataclysmic – here we are because of that meeting of worlds. Fear is not the only possible response to such a meeting, but it is a reasonable one.
Come with the women to the tomb. Like a group of aboriginal women walking down to the shore to collect shellfish on January 26th 1788, they come. They have no reason to think that today will not be like any other. The journey to the tomb is a familiar experience, certainly not a happy one, but they know what death looks like, what it smells like, they have no reason to expect anything different today. Or do they?
Yes they do, because in Mark’s gospel Jesus tells his followers, clearly, unequivocally, and frequently exactly what was going to happen to him. He told them, ‘the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.’ Another time he said… ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again. And once more just to hammer the point home, … they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.’ (Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34)
And today is the third day. Up till now things have gone exactly as he predicted. The women at the tomb should know what to expect, they should be prepared for the breaking in of that different world. They shouldn’t need to ask, “Who will roll away the stone?”.
But to be fair to them, sometimes it is hard to be prepared even when we have been warned what to expect. Think of recent warnings that have gone out around us: “The conditions will be the worst we have seen. Leave early or stay and defend; make a survival plan; prepare and protect, your property and yourself; pack a safety kit and a treasure box”.
And many people living in our fire prone regions were very well prepared, but what confronted them this time was beyond expectation, impossible to prepare for. Even some of the best prepared were caught by surprise, overwhelmed by the horror of what actually arrived. And how hard it must be to prepare months or even years in advance when there is no threat, when all is fine and familiar, when we’d rather be doing other things, when it is hard to imagine that life could be so totally disrupted, that beauty could become terror.
Who would have thought that Jesus, this gentle healer, this wise teacher, could be the victim of such brutal destruction. He warned them, but they still didn’t see it coming. Easter is like a bushfire carried by gale force winds in a time of drought – coming out of nowhere – changing everything – that big, that frightening. We know the paradox of fire in this land Australia: it is destructive and terrifying, but necessary and life giving – growth emerges from the destruction and death.
Easter brings new life, like a fire. It changes everything. And, if we are willing, we could be transformed by it too, and join the risen Jesus in transforming the injustices of the world. But change can be frightening.
Are we like the women coming to the tomb, bringing spices to anoint a corpse – prepared for death, but unprepared for new life, for a new creation? Do our “Alleluias” mask a deep desire to stay as we are and to let the world be as it is? Deep down are we frightened by what God might be asking of us, by the new thing God is doing in our world?
The women ran away in terror. Perhaps on some level we do too.
But this Easter, if we could see our world as the first white settlers saw Australia, and as the indigenous people saw the new arrivals, if we could see God’s wonderful, and unsettling new life breaking in around us – breaking in with healing, reconciling, saving power, like a cleansing fire – imagine how life could be. It would be like seeing a Bilby around every corner – shocking, stunning, amazing – seeing a Bilby every day and never getting used to it, never becoming complacent. “There’s another one!” we’d say with awe struck delight, “There is love! There is hope! There is peace! There is life! There is Christ!”
May Easter shock you this year, stun you, amaze you. For God is doing something new. It begins with Christ, and goes on in us.
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